Many times the hardest part about achieving a dream isn’t actually achieving it—it’s stepping through your fear of the unknown when you don’t have a plan. Having a teacher or boss tell you what to do makes life a lot easier. But nobody
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“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
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“But if seeing 16 sunrises a day and all of Earth's variety steadily on display for five months had taught me anything, it was that there are always more challenges and opportunities out there than time to experience them.”
― An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
― An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
“If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you're setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time.”
― An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
― An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
“The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests? The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric. If life exists as an organic whole and cannot be separated into parts without losing a sense of the whole, then thinking should make itself equal to the whole.”
― Mastery
― Mastery
“In any new situation, whether it involves an elevator or a rocket ship, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero: your impact is neutral and doesn't tip the balance one way or the other. Or you'll be seen as a plus one: someone who actively adds value. Everyone wants to be a plus one, of course. But proclaiming your plus-oneness at the outset almost guarantees you'll be perceived as a minus one, regardless of the skills you bring to the table or how you actually perform.”
― An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
― An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
Ivan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ivan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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